6 Growth Marketing Tactics For Your e-Residency Startup
Like all other startups, “e-Residency companies” need to grow and make sales in order to be sustainable. Sales is a lifeblood of any business. And to get sales, you need to find leads. Which means you have to give a considerable effort to do marketing.
Marketing, if done well, makes sales easy. Good marketing takes you 75% of the way. And while marketing as a theme is too wide to cover here, we’re going to bring out 6 tactics you can use to grow your e-Residency business. These tactics were shared by Julian Shapiro in the Trends community.
1. Cost-Effective YouTube Sponsorships
You’re usually charged based on the number of subscribers, but what’s actually important is the video views. There’s a disconnect, and you can get a good deal. Find YouTubers with low subs, whose their videos actually get a lot of views. This is because they’re talking about something that’s timely and viral.
As they don’t have a high number of subs yet, they haven’t priced in their popularity. Ideally, it’s someone who is on the verge of breaking out. If you use YouTube, you probably know some guys who should have a lot more subs that they have.
Ask your ad to be shown early in the video, as the statistics tell that ads shown in the first minute of the video significantly outperform the ads shown later in the video.
2. Blog visitors into leads
You can have a great blog with good traffic numbers, but if you’re not turning these visitors into leads, it’s a waste. There are couple of good email capture techniques to try out.
Guides – put together a high-quality PDF, and give the first few pages as a teaser. If the visitor wants the whole guide, they can get it against providing you their email. Add social sharing options.
Quiz – You can create a quiz for your visitors, and once they’ve completed the quiz, they want to see the results. In order to see the results, they need to provide you with their email.
Collecting the emails of the visitors is a great way to create direct communication with the otherwise “lost” visitors.
3. Pre-targeting via LinkedIn
Planning to do some cold-emailing and connecting with potential clients?
Wait a sec.
What if we can make the leads a bit warmer? And increase the chances of hearing back from the leads we are connecting with.
The idea here is to run ads to the specific target group on LinkedIn before getting in touch with them. What you have to do is to take a list of emails you planned to connect with, and upload them to LinkedIn ads.
Then, you can advertise to these people with a very targeted and specific message (not in a creepy way like “Hey John, I know you’re seeing this, I will send you an email soon”). Something more vague about what you do.
And finally, after a few weeks, when you send out your emails, they know your company. They’re familiar with the name of the company. It’s a huge win as a first step!
4. Newsletter Unsubscribers
Someone unsubscribed. This happens. To all of us. The person doesn’t want to receive your emails.
This doesn’t mean they’re not a buyer. Perhaps they want the new product or service you’re bringing to the market next month?
The possibility here is to create a custom audience by uploading their emails to Facebook Business Manager (includes Instagram), LinkedIn, and even Pinterest and Snapchat. And then direct ads to these people.
Bring back those lost leads. They’re still potential clients.
5. Avoid agressive CTAs
CTA stands for call-to-action. Essentially, it’s the copy on the button that asks the lead to take action. To register, buy, click, etc.
If people don’t know you, and they’re just first-time visitors on your website, you can scare them away by asking them to make a purchase-decision right-away.
It’s a bit like dating – you first have to flirt a bit and create a connection before you ask for any kind of action.
It’s better to have a good copy and describe what you’re doing before you ask for anything that requires a credit card number. People have to be excited to make a payment.
Using “gentle” CTAs like “Continue”, “Try it for free”, “Get started”, are likely to be more successful to get leads into the funnel.
6. Break-even ads
If the ad isn’t turning in profit, we often cut it. Same for us at Comistar.
But there’s an opportunity to increase the brand awareness, if the ad is breaking even. Big companies spend millions to increase the brand awareness. If you can do it on the cost-basis, it’s actually a great success.
I remember when we did a really targeted advertising a while ago on Google and social media. We did not make a lot of money, but just enough to cover the ads.
Yet, several leads said that you guys are everywhere and must spend a ton on marketing. We did not spend a ton. Far from it. But we kept our ads showing and it benefited the brand awareness.
Conclusion
These are some of the tactics you can use to grow your e-Residency startup. There are many more, but we’ll keep something for the next blog posts. If you’re planning to start your business in Estonia, get in touch with us.